Daft Punk: Random Access Memories

(Winner of 2013 Album of the Year and Best Dance/Electronica Album Grammy Awards, containing the song "Get Lucky," which won Record of the Year and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance Grammies) At 75-minutes, Daft Punk's homage to old-school disco is a true dance jam. "Get Lucky," the album's much-ballyhooed first single, features lead vocals from Pharrell Williams and guitar work by Nile Rodgers, who co-founded the great disco band Chic in the 1970s.

"There's definitely an epic heft to it, aided by a deep, varied bench of guest talent…. In the closing 'Contact,' an Apollo 17 transmission sets up a mathematical keyboard line playing against a full-chord organ while live drums crash and roll in a hyperspace rush."—Boston Globe

"After years of constructing their music by sampling bits of other artists' beats and riffs, using technology to strip dance music down to its essence, they want to build their sound back up with fresh humanity. They do it by largely avoiding samples, having Rodgers and others play real guitars and inviting other, non-mechanized voices to do some of the vocal work…. One of my favorite cuts is 'Fragments of Time,' which features a vocal by Todd Edwards and sounds a little like vintage Steely Dan, sleek and serenely clever. 'Turning our days into melodies,' goes a line … and it's this new desire to create songs that you and I could sing along to—to maintain the intensity and rhythms of dance music while letting it take a human breath—that gives Random Access Memories its touching vulnerability…. This is music that uses its creators' thorough sense of pop history to create a sense of uplift, purpose and passion."—Ken Tucker, NPR

"It's fantastic stuff. Julian Casablancas of the Strokes acquiesces to the proceedings … Auto-Tuning his voice into aural wallpaper. It works. Pharrell Williams, a singer and producer whose falsetto coated hip-hop radio in the aughties, dominates the tracks he appears on…. The guests clear out for 'The Game of Love' and 'Within,' two absorbing robo-ballads that map out the shrinking gap between humanity and technology."—Washington Post